And then you exhort me not to live on vegetables. Is it because you live on meat? I don't think I mind your eating meat, so why should you mind my eating vegetables? I have done it for a week now quite steadily, and mean to give it at least a fair trial. If what the books we have got about it say is true, health and sanity lie that way. And how delightful to have a pure kitchen into which ghastly dead things never come. I will not be a partaker of the nature of beasts. I will not become three parts pig, or goose, or foolish sheep. I turn with aversion from the reddened horror called gravy. I consider it a monstrous ugly thing to have particles of pig rioting up and down my veins, turning into brains, coloring my thoughts, becoming a very part of my body. Surely a body is a wonderful thing? So wonderful that it cannot be treated with too much care and respect? So wonderful that it cannot be too carefully guarded from corruption? And have you ever studied the appearance and habits of pigs?
But I do admit that being a vegetarian is bewildering. None of the books say a word about the odd feeling one has of not having had anything to eat. What Papa felt that first day I have felt every day since. I am perpetually hungry; and it is the unpleasant hunger that expresses itself in a dislike for food, in listlessness, inability to work, flabbiness, even faintness. At eight in the morning I begin with bread and plums. My entire being cries out while I am eating them for coffee with milk in it and butter on my bread. But coffee is a stimulant, and the books say that butter contains no nourishment whatever, and since what I most yearn for is to be nourished I will waste no time eating stuff that doesn't do it. Instead, I eat heaps of bread and stacks of plums, not because I want to but because I'm afraid the gnawing feeling will follow sooner than ever if I don't. Papa sits opposite me, breakfasting pleasantly on eggs, for he explains he is doing things gradually and is using the eggs to build wise bridges across the gulf between the end of meat and the beginning of what he persists in describing as herbage. At nine I feel as if I had had no breakfast. All the pains I took to get through the bread were of no real use. I struggle against this for as long as possible, because the books say you mustn't have things between meals, and then I go and eat more plums. I am amazed when I remember that once I liked plums. No words can express my abhorrence of them now. But what is to be done? They are the only fruit we can get. Cherries are over. Apples have not begun. We buy the plums from the neighbor down the hill. To add to my horror of them I have discovered that hardly one is without a wriggly live thing inside it. I wonder how many of them I have eaten. Can they be brought into the category vegetarian? Papa says yes, because they have lived and moved and had their being in an atmosphere of pure plum. They are plum, says Papa, consoling me,—bits of plum that have acquired the power to walk about. But according to that beef must be vegetarian too,—so much grass grown able to walk about. It is very bewildering. One day the neighbor—he is a nice neighbor, interested in our experiment—sent us some raspberries, a basket of them, all glowing, and downy, and delicious with dew, and covered with a beautiful silvery cabbage leaf; but they were afflicted in just the same way, only more so. Papa says, why do I look? I must look now that I have seen the things once; and so the end of the raspberries was that most of them went out into the kitchen, and Johanna, who has no prejudices, stewed them into compote and ate them, including the inhabitants, for her supper.
For dinner, by which time I am curiously shaky, quite indifferent to food, and possessed of an immense longing to lie down on a sofa and do nothing, we have salad and potatoes and fruit—of course plums—and lentils because they are so good for us (it is a pity they are also so nasty), and cheese because one book says (it is an extraordinarily convincing book) that if a man shall eat beef steadily for a whole morning from six to twelve without stopping, he will not at the end have taken in half the nourishing matter that he would have absorbed after two minutes laid out judiciously on cheese. Unfortunately I don't like cheese. After dinner I shut myself up with the works of Mr. Eustace Miles, which tell me in invigorating language of all the money, time, and energy I have saved, of my increase of bodily health, of how active I am getting, how skilful and of what a tough endurance, how my brains have grown clear and nimble, my morals risen high above the average, and how keen my enjoyment of everything has become, including, strange to say, my food. I read lying down, too spiritless to sit up; and Johanna in the kitchen, who has dined on pig and beer, washes up with the clatter of exuberant energy, singing while she does so in a voice that shakes the house that once she liebte ein Student.
It is very bewildering. The advice one gets points in such opposite directions. For instance, the neighbor made friends the very first evening with Papa, who walked with injudicious inattention in our garden and slipped down through a gap in the fence into his orchard and his arms, he being engaged in picking up the fallen plums for his wife to make jam of; and he told me when he came in one day at dinner and found me struggling through what he considered dark ways and I thought were cabbages, that my salvation lay in almonds. I went down to Jena that afternoon and bought three pounds of them. They were dear, and dreadfully heavy to carry up the hill, and when I was panting past the neighbor's gate his wife, a friendly lady who reads right through the advertisements in the paper every morning and spends her evenings with a pencil working out the acrostics, was standing at it cool and comfortable; and she asked me, with the simple inquisitiveness natural to our nation, what I had got in my parcel; and I, glad to stop a moment and get my breath, told her; and she immediately scoffed both at her husband and at the almonds, and said if I ate them I would lay up for myself an old age steeped in a dreadful thing called xanthin poison. I went home and consulted the books. The neighbor's wife was right. Johanna made macaroons of the almonds, and Papa, who loves macaroons, chose to disbelieve the neighbor's wife and ate them.
But the books are not always so unanimous as they were about this. One exhorted us to eat many peas and beans, which we were cheerfully doing,—for are they not in summer pleasant things?—when I read in another that we might as well eat poison, so full were they, too, of qualities ending in xanthin poison. Lentils, recommended warmly by most books, are discountenanced by two because they make you fat. Rice has shared the same condemnation. Lettuces we may eat, but without the oil that soothes and the vinegar that interests, and if you add salt to them you will be thirsty, and you must never drink. An undressed lettuce—a quite naked lettuce—is a very dull thing. Really, I would as soon eat grass. We do refuse at present to follow this cruel advice, and have salad every day in defiance of it, but my conscience forces me to put less and less dressing in it each time, hoping that so shall we wean ourselves from the craving for it—'gradually,' as Papa says. Carrots, too, the books warn us against. I forget what it is they do to you that is serious, but the neighbor told me they make your skin shine, and since he told me that no carrot has crossed our threshold. Apples we may eat, but we are not to suppose that they will nourish us; they are useful only for preventing, by their bulk, the walls of our insides from coming together. The walls of the vegetarian inside are very apt to come together if the owner strikes out all the things he is warned against from his menu, and then it is, when they are about to do that, that fibrous bulk, most convenient in this form, should be applied; and, like the roasted Sunday goose of our fleshlier days in Rauchgasse, the vegetarian goes about stuffed with apples. Meanwhile there are no apples, and I know not whither I must turn in search of bulk. Do you think that in another week I shall be strong enough to write to you?